


Things Seen and Unseen

by CreepingMuse, JWAB



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Bi!Jenny, Canonical Ichabbie, F/F, F/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-18 10:23:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4702538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreepingMuse/pseuds/CreepingMuse, https://archiveofourown.org/users/JWAB/pseuds/JWAB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When helping Abbie and Crane lands Jenny with disturbing magical powers, she must turn to the last person in the world she wants to for help: Her ex-girlfriend.</p><p>Featuring zombies, canon Ichabbie, and the bisexual Jenny you've been waiting for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Jenny’s hand was around her pistol before she was even fully awake. Knocking. Insistent but not urgent.  The problem was that there was knocking at all.

Not many people knew she’d moved out of Abbie’s place and into this tiny basement studio with easily defensible barred windows and a surprisingly fantastic claw foot tub. That’s the way Jenny preferred it. The fewer people who knew where she lived, the better.

But someone had found her.            

She advanced on the door. The knocking continued. Safety off. She peered through the peephole and was immediately confronted with one massive blue eye, like some sort of distorted giant squid.

Jenny groaned as she undid the chain and four deadbolts. “You coulda just _called._ ”

“We did. You didn’t answer.” Abbie gave her a quick up and down, taking in her sleep shirt and wrapped hair. “It’s 3 in the afternoon.”

“Yeah, well. Had to meet a vampire about a thing with some stuff.” She flipped the safety on and stepped aside. Crane bounded in while Abbie followed more cautiously. “There’s no Bundt cake so this can’t be a housewarming. Something must be up.”

“Our apologies for disturbing you at rest, certainly,” Crane said. “We would not do so if it were not urgent.” He stood in the center of the box that was her apartment, obviously itching to poke into the corners, peek into the closed chests and shrouded piles that clearly drove him crazy. But he just stood with his hands behind his back.

His good manners didn’t make Jenny any less paranoid. She scanned the room; nothing incriminating out the open. She typically kept her weirder collections under lock and key and charms besides, but there was always the chance she’d gotten sloppy. But not this time. And besides, this was Crane. She liked him. And Abbie loved him. That was enough to earn a little trust. She told her paranoia to go fuck itself and focused on her visitors.

Smudge of soot on Abbie’s cheek and a tear on the shoulder of her leather jacket. Crane wasn’t much better – hair half-torn free from his ponytail, a fresh bandage wrapped around his left wrist. “Looks like you’ve been having fun without me.”

Abbie’s lips twitched. “You know we’d have called you if we had time. Hate to leave you out of a party.”

“You okay?” Jenny asked quietly.

“Yeah. Thanks.” Jenny must have looked skeptical, because Abbie touched the back of her hand. “Promise. There were these guys with these short little swords –“

“Dirks,” Crane butted in. “Commonly carried by seamen –“

“Don’t,” Abbie warned her sister.

“Too easy,” Jenny said.

“—and also popular among early American settlers in coastal colonies. Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, so on and so forth,” Crane continued, plucking at his bandage. “Nasty bite to them.”

“They had some kinda weird steampunk flamethrowers too. I don’t know. We stumbled on them in this abandoned house we’d had complaints on. We thought it was kids, didn’t expect to walk into an ambush.”

“So are they still there? We need to go root them out? Let me put some pants on.”

“Oh no, they’re quite dead,” Crane said pleasantly. Jenny reflected, not for the first time, that their lives were really fucking weird. “But they left this behind.” He produced a red silk bag from his pocket and tipped two rocks into his giant hand.

Well, not rocks. Crystals, spikey and translucently blue, each about the size of her little finger. Quartz, maybe. Crane pressed the jagged ends of the two rocks together; they’d clearly once been a single stone, their jagged ends fit together like puzzle pieces.

 “Huh. Okay. What is it?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Abbie said. “But they wanted them. Bad. Died protecting them. And with your connections and all, we thought you might know. Or might know somebody who knows. Or know somebody who knows somebody who knows.”

“I mean, I can try.” Jenny held her hand out to Crane. “Weapons are more my thing, but I bet – _Jesus!_ ”

When the stones touched her skin, it was like the second just before a sneeze. Every nerve and cell was filled with numbing pulsing, straining for something just out of reach. She threw the rocks to the floor, sure it would stop as soon as the fucking things were away from her. And she was right. That aching rush was gone, but in its place was something much, much worse.

In between one blink and the next, the world changed. Everything was shot through with a riot of shifting, swirling colors. Electricity hummed through the walls in crackling shades of green. They sang to her, called to her, begged her to take, to touch to … do what? Jenny shuddered and staggered a step back.

“Miss Jenny?” Looking at Crane was a mistake. Rivers of blood crawled beneath his skin, air rushed in and out of his lungs like waves, the neurons in his brain fired and twinkled. And they, too, sang to her, humming bizarrely beautiful songs, whispering, inviting.

She touched the bright, pulsing place in his chest, where blood beat and breath rushed, not with her hand but with some new appendage only she could see.

Static buzzed through her.

All six feet and change of Ichabod Crane _thumped_ to the floor like a sack of flour.  

Abbie cried his name. Jenny was vaguely aware that Abbie was on her knees beside him, checking his pulse, pressing at his motionless chest. But Jenny could only watch with fascination as the blood in Crane’s veins stagnated, as the air in his lungs cooled and pooled, as the stars dancing in his head blinked out.

“Jenny, what happened? _Help him_. _”_

She crashed down beside her sister. She still felt drunk and spinny, but Christ, this was _Crane_ and whatever happened she’d done it and she was going to be the only one to undo it.

She touched the same place she had before, but this time with purpose. _Wake up,_ she commanded. The heart twitched once. That was it. Just once.

She tried again. This time she pushed down with that phantom limb like she was performing metaphysical CPR, the ghostly counterpoint to the very real resuscitation her sister attempted. She bore down rhythmically, time and again.

The blood in his veins took on a thick, chunky texture.

Undo it. Undo it. Undo it. She could do this. She had to. There was no fucking way she was going to be responsible for killing her sister’s boyfriend, who also happened to be chosen of God. No. She kept pressing, pounding, pushing.

Tears dripped onto Crane’s chest as Abbie worked.

The terror etched onto Abbie’s face made every muscle in Jenny’s body clench – including whatever she was using to touch Crane. It contracted tight around his heart and with no warning, it started beating again. Almost casually, like it had just forgotten for a minute that oh yeah, my goddamn job is to circulate blood and keep this motherfucker alive. Blood flowed as if it had never stopped. Crane gasped for new, clean air, his cheeks flooding with color.

Jenny slumped onto her side. The world was veiled with a gray haze, the color leached out of it.  

“Jenny? Christ, Jenny –“

“’m fine,” she mumbled. “Help him. “Abbie patted Jenny’s side, quick and worried. The hummingbird jitter of Abbie’s heartbeat drilled into Jenny’s bones. 

As Abbie fussed over Crane, Jenny crawled to her feet. The stones lay on the ground. Just two broken blue rocks. She clenched a tight fist so no one could see how she trembled.

Crane was still sprawled on the floor breathing like he was in a Lamaze class. But Abbie was beside her, wiping her cheek with her shirtsleeve. “What the hell happened?”

“I didn’t mean to.” With her fist closed, her whole hand shook. Then her whole arm. She sat on the edge of her mattress. It was like being possessed all over again. Those horrible times when the world went black and she awoke to destruction with her fingerprints all over it. It didn’t matter what she’d meant or not meant to do. She _had._

“I’m quite all right,” Crane chimed in a voice that was anything but. “Needed a bit of a rest anyway.”

“What was that rock? What the fuck did you hand me?”

“Both of us touched it first. Nothing happened.” Abbie sat next to her. Glimmers of color flickered through the gray, this time under Abbie’s skin – blue blood gushing away from the heart, sickly green acid churning in her stomach. Jenny shuddered away from her sister.

“Well something happened to me.” _These things never seemed to happen to Abbie_ , the uncharitable part of her thought. Abbie touched the stove and Jenny was the one who got burned. “Tell me everything you know about it.”

The short answer: Not much. Just that a bunch of guys in suits who didn’t seem to bleed when you shot them were very concerned about keeping it safe. Besides the broken rock, they’d found a journal.  And the journal wasn’t exactly a journal. There were no written words, but there were endless drawings of herbs and rocks and detailed diagrams of human bodies.

Jenny, in turn, tried to explain whatever the fuck had happened to her. How the world became _more_ and was begging for her to touch it, change it, control it. Crane, for his part, said he hadn’t felt anything at all. “Like a lamp being doused,” he explained, rubbing his chest. “The rekindling was significantly more painful – not that I blame you, of course.”

The “I’m sorry” stuck in her throat and she just nodded. She could blame herself enough for the both of them.

Crane took Abbie’s hand. Something glimmery and gold poured down from the bases of their skulls and fizzed through their bodies. Serotonin? Love? Jenny needed this to stop right fucking now.

“Big thing now is making sure it doesn’t happen again,” Abbie said. “You don’t see all that anymore, right? Maybe it was a fluke.”

“It comes and goes. Right now, it comes. But I’m gonna get this figured out.” She clutched at the journal they’d given her.

“We’ll help. You won’t be doing this alone.”

“Of course not,” Crane agreed.

Jenny smiled and agreed. Told them how good it was to have them on her team. That she appreciated it, but right now she was drained and needed to rest. They left with worried looks and promises they were only a phone call away. Abbie tried to squeeze Jenny’s hand reassuringly as she left, but Jenny skittered away.

Once they finally left, Jenny made plans to solve this on her own.

Not that she didn’t think Abbie and Crane would try. They would. And God, all of this was so much easier now that Abbie knew Jenny wasn’t crazy. Now that they were a team, like they were before the trees. Like they were meant to be as adults.  But Abbie and Crane had a lot else on their plate. Today it was raiding random demon houses. Tomorrow maybe it would be some monster alligator in the sewers or the third horseman spreading whooping cough at the elementary school or Crane’s second cousin twice removed would turn out evil. They had good intentions. They just couldn’t give her their full attention.

Which was fine. Jenny was fully capable of dealing with this on her own.

First on her list: The rocks.

She nudged them with her foot. They remained stupid fucking rocks. She knelt and used the silk purse to scoop them up, then took a deep breath and let the colors creep back over her vision.

Everything else was a riot of movement and life. But the rocks were inert. They didn’t glow, didn’t sing, didn’t call to her. They were just cool and still. Kinda refreshing, to be honest.

Also useless.

Jenny didn’t leave her apartment for three days. Couldn’t risk the chance that she’d hurt someone like she’d hurt Crane. But in the underground gloom, she placed phone calls all over the world, Skyped with experts, begged for access to online databases.

The journal was her best help. Jenny was no expert, but based on the crumbly paper and faded ink, she’d put it early 17th century. More than halfway through, there was an unmistakable sketch of the rock – only it was in one piece. There were drawings of the rock being buried in the ground, glittering in the sun, being soaked in water. There were scenes of a woman holding the rock over people, of healings, of miracles.

Jenny kept digging, but hit bedrock at every turn. She emailed pictures of the journal to a historian who immediately started demanding answers about where she’d found it. Jenny stopped answering and deleted the burner email address.

She Skyped with a professor at the University of the West Indies in Barbados who told her about the ways Yoruba magic mixed with native Arawak traditions and yes, stones were sometimes used as magical receptacles by Barbadians. So was that what she had?

A contact with a much less prestigious educational pedigree and only one working hand told her that yeah, there was tons of magic that had to do with manipulating the body’s energy. Chi manipulation, hoodoo, stone work, tons of it. Never heard of it coming on all of a sudden, though. And hey, did Jenny know a priest who would bless bullets and not ask questions?

None of it explained why touching a magical battery, basically, would change Jenny. None of it was helping her make it go away. Because it was getting worse.

The magical vision painted the world without warning, and every time it did, it stayed longer. She spent a long afternoon staring at her own body, watching the blood and the oxygen and the _life_ moving through her in all its beauty. Could she stop her own heart the way she’d stopped Crane’s? She felt her cells dying natural deaths, blinking out, each one a tiny thing that had once been her but now was no more. Then the seething colors and hyperactive awareness of the whole world was gone and the world was dingy.

She drank vodka from a plastic bottle until she fell into a colorless sleep.

Jenny missed Corbin. That was what she wanted more than anything: Another exorcism. A quick fix that got this thing _out of her_ and got her back to the way she was. Maybe it was safer to just take a page out of her old playbook, get locked up, make sure she couldn’t hurt anyone. But even in the deepest, darkest solitary known to man, she’d still be close to hundreds of other pulsing bodies. No. This time, there was no escape.

Irving called once. He texted a few times, _you’ve got this; come on Mills, trust us, we’re your team; need to talk_? She did. She wanted to. There was a time she thought she might tell him everything. But now, things were different. Tense, surface. He was reaching out because he was a good person, but it was all too careful. He was trying to make it work with Cynthia, make it right with Macey. Jenny was a distant third, if that. Which was the way it should be. She knew better than to wonder about what might have been. She gave him his space, for both their sakes.

Abbie and Crane came by a couple times. They brought her Chinese food and encouragement, though no answers. They’d fallen down their own rabbit hole, as she knew they would, something about Increase Mather and zombies in black suits and you remember those guys who they said were very dead? Yeah, not so much.

Crane went out of his way to show her he wasn’t afraid of her. He brought her extra fortune cookies and helped her decipher some of the shitty (“ornate”) handwriting in the old journal. They helped a lot, the both of them.

“You have to come out sometime,” Abbie said as she left on the third day. “You can’t hole up in here. Maybe this is the new normal now.”

“Or maybe I just need to try harder to fix this.”

 _Fix._ That’s what gave her the idea. The idea to look at the stone again with her Magic-O-Vision, and to focus on the broken bits, the places where they should fit together.

It was faint, but it was there if she squinted. Coating each broken end of the stones there was a silvery sheen, an echo of some long-ago magic.

Jenny jumped on the hope of that gleam. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the reason this thing went haywire on her but not on Abbie or Crane. When a wire’s shorting out, it won’t zap you every time, right? But all it takes is one good one. Maybe the same thing was happening here.

Jenny became fixated on the brokenness of the stones. That had to be it. Had to explain it. If they were one again, whole, maybe this all would go away. The book proved they were supposed to be one unit. Time and again she fit them together and marveled at how perfectly they fit. They were _supposed_ to be one. She was tempted just to take some fucking super glue and voila, rocks fixed while you wait, but knew it couldn’t be that simple.

The good news was she knew someone who could fix anything. The more supernaturally weird, the better.

The bad news was it was the last person in the world she wanted to call.

Laura would know how to fix this. She was so good, she made science look like magic. Or maybe it was. Laura knew about both. She was more comfortable in the world of logic and reason, but anyone who spent enough time with Jenny was going to see some weird shit. Laura had embraced that, been fascinated about it, immersed herself in it and become a better scientist because of it.

Curiosity was the sexiest thing about Laura. Well, that and her ass. She had a glorious ass _._ But Laura had never met a problem. Only a solution she hadn’t figured out yet. She’d tell Jenny it was okay, and while of course Jenny was scared wasn’t this kind of _exciting_ when you thought about it in the right way? Then she would make the stones meld back together. Or explain that the stones _wanted_ to be one again, and it was her job to find out how to get that done. And she’d push that thick black hair out of her eyes – it was always in her eyes – and look up at Jenny and smile and …

Jenny couldn’t call Laura. Not calling was what Jenny did best. The two of them had drifted apart, drifted away, until neither one of them could see the other quite clearly.

They’d never put a hard stop on their relationship. Never said goodbye or had one last blow out. But it was over. Had been for a long time. And Jenny was in no shape to dredge that all up again.

Nope, bringing Laura into this would be too complicated. Jenny had to solve this problem all on her own. So on the fourth day, she left the apartment.  A small step, but it felt big. She waited until the Magic-O-Vision was gone to leave, though that proved pointless. It flared to Technicolor life the second she stepped foot into the sunshine.

It was the kind of day that wanted to be spring but couldn’t quite shake off the chill edge of winter. Jenny heard the sap moving in the trees, sluggish and slow. Her skin tingled with the vicarious anticipation of buds eager to bust out. There was power waiting. Untapped potential energy. Jenny could take it. Make it hers. And do anything with it.

Maybe she should. Maybe this magic was given to her for a reason. A weapon to use in the fight. Abbie got her weirdo bond with Crane. It could be that Jenny was destined to help her and this was how she’d do it. It could be, right? Maybe she should stop fighting it and learn to use it.

Then she remembered how easy it had been to drop Crane. Just a curious touch and he was, for all intents and purposes, dead. One touch.

She walked faster.

No thanks. She’d take guns over this any day. She knew how to use a gun. Knew how not to hurt people accidentally. But with this? There was no safety on this.

And what if it was fate? What if she was meant to be this way? She didn’t want to think about God, but what if it was God? That made her a pawn in someone else’s game again.

No. She wouldn’t be used again. Not by magic. Not by anyone.

Jenny was going to figure out how to control this. Well, suppress. Suppress was a better word. Best way to start was with a small test. Pop quiz, Jenny Mills: Can you go to the store and not murder anyone? Remember, there is no extra-credit and no do-overs.

An electronic chime _pinged_ as she walked into the market at the corner of Bellwood and Highland. As usual, it was grimy and empty except for a prune of a shopkeeper who sat behind a Plexiglas barrier.

“Here to buy something?” he croaked.

Jenny stiffened. “Isn’t that why people usually come into stores?”

He grunted. Jenny wanted to walk right the fuck out, but she needed to pass this test. So far, she was okay. The electricity in the walls ran in fitful spurts that made her veins itch, but she was getting used to that now. The rest of it – the rats nibbling stale corndogs in the back room, the cockroaches fucking in the walls, the fact that she now knew Prune Face had an obstructed bowel -- she could tune out. Mostly. Partially. Kinda.

Jenny browsed the dirty little shelves, acutely aware the shop owner was following her in those security mirrors. What here was even worth stealing? Expired gummy bears? She shook her head and grabbed a tea from the cooler. It didn’t look too scuzzy.

“Turn out your pockets,” the shop owner said as she plunked the tea and her dollar on the counter.

“Excuse me?”

“Saw you take it.”

Heat flared at the back of Jenny’s neck. Now, she’d rightfully been accused of stealing before. That was one thing. But they both knew she hadn’t taken anything. “No you didn’t. Because I didn’t.”

“Then turn out your pockets or I call the cops.”

The air in the man’s lungs went still. Trapped. Nothing moved in. Nothing moved out. It was only for a second, but it was enough for him to let out the most horrible tea-kettle sound and for her to desperately poke at the power again until suddenly the air exploded out of him in a coughing fit.

There had been no thought. Just anger and reaction.

She ran.

She needed to fix this.

She needed Laura.


	2. Chapter 2

Jenny dialed the same six digits maybe twenty times. She couldn’t make it to the seventh, couldn’t press 3, couldn’t open the line to Laura and her inevitable recrimination. _Where were you? What happened to you? I texted, I waited._

_It’s awful when you don’t realize the last time is the last time, Jenny. How could you do that to me?_

Or maybe she wouldn’t care how long their silence had lasted, and how much worse would that be? _Oh hey, what’s up?_ As if it were nothing at all for Jenny to reach out like this. As if Jenny were nothing at all.

Maybe it was talking on the phone that she couldn’t manage. Collapsing their distance, having her right there, speaking into her ear. Too close and too far simultaneously. And they were never much for phones, neither of them.

A quick phone call to Abbie and a probably illegal use of the police database verified that Laura Nuñez still lived at the corner of Beekman and Pocantico. Jenny parked around the corner, out of sight, and walked the half block to 217. The outside of the apartment building hadn’t changed: the same gray grime climbing the front windows at the entrance, the same broken buzzer. A squashed Coke can held the front door open a crack. Jenny held her breath and stepped inside.

The elevators were the same, too. All that was different was Jenny, who watched electricity whir inside the wires under the sliding doors’ metal casing. She pressed the button and it awakened a slim corridor of green light, frenzied like a hive of bees.

The inside of the elevator was so much worse: crackling circuitry sped above her head, under her feet, in a grid behind aluminum walls. A living prison. Jenny closed her eyes and waited for the ding, fists clenched tight.

She didn’t even know if Laura was home, and yes, it would be so much easier if she wasn’t and Jenny could chalk this up to a shitty idea, but she couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t live in a world where energy and life offered itself up to her control.

Fourth floor, around the corner, second door on the left. Unsettling Magic-O-Vision showed her the green sparks darting in narrow rivulets between slabs of dead wood. She held her breath and knocked.

Sometimes Laura didn’t hear the phone or the door. Or the person standing two feet away from her. She would become so absorbed in whatever she was fixing that nothing could penetrate. Jenny would have to touch her to get her attention. Maybe Jenny’d get lucky and Laura wouldn’t hear her knock, so she could slink away unnoticed and move to a deserted island where should couldn’t almost choke people to death.

But no, the deadbolt twisted and released and there was Laura, the same soft curls framing her face. And for a split second she flashed the beginning of a smile and her eyes sparkled with recognition. But only a split second, not even long enough to be sure Jenny hadn’t imagined it, and then something much more careful took its place. “Look who’s here,” Laura said.

“Hi.” That was all Jenny was willing to hazard while her brain offered up more embarrassing options: _surprise, sorry I’m two years late, are you aging backwards?, have you always been this beautiful?, I’ve got a malfunctioning devil rock with your name on it._

Laura blinked slowly. “Hi,” she repeated, and waited.

Red arteries came to the surface of Laura’s golden brown skin, some thick like worms after rain, some as thin as spider silk. Her heart sped inside her chest, pumping wildly.

It was disgusting. And fascinating. Laura was flushed and anxious: Jenny could see it plain as day.

It was too much.

Jenny bit the inside of her lip to distract herself, to make it stop. She pressed her eyes so hard with her index finger and thumb that stars bloomed under her eyelids. With her other hand, she dug the red silk bag out of her jeans pocket. “I wouldn’t come here for just anything. I mean, I wouldn’t bother you for nothing. I just, I need your help.”

Laura silently studied Jenny’s face.

“Please.”

Then she squinted at the bag in Jenny’s palm, impassive.

Waiting for an answer, Jenny almost regretted coming in person. At least on the phone you could hang up when you got turned down, no face to face confrontation, no need to register hurt or anger. Just a satisfying silence on the other end.

So was this no? It looked a hell of a lot like no, and Jenny hadn’t actually contemplated what she would do if Laura said no. There wasn’t anyone else. What if Laura shut the door in her face? “I can pay you,” she scrambled.

“Fuck you, Jennifer Mills.”

Jenny’s breath caught in her throat, her eyes wide, and then she huffed a disbelieving laugh. She’d forgotten how much she loved the way Laura said her name, the way her faint Cuban accent would creep in and lengthen the “i,” soften the “r.” She’d also forgotten that Laura could be a little shit sometimes.

Laura’s stiff composure relaxed.

“Fine,” she said, stepping back to make a path. “Come in.”

It smelled exactly the same, Laura’s apartment, lemon and metal. “You rearranged the living room,” Jenny blurted.

“Twice.”

Jenny followed Laura to her workroom, the bigger of the two bedrooms in the apartment. Laura’s bedroom door was open at the end of the hallway, her ochre comforter rumpled at the foot of the bed, and it occurred to Jenny that Laura might not be single.

The thought sent a jolt through her bones.

“So what’s in the bag?” Laura asked, sitting at one of the long tables that lined the walls.

“This,” Jenny said, tipping them out onto the work surface. “Don’t touch.”

Laura switched on the lamp and positioned it over the broken rock. Her fingers hovered; she always wanted to touch. “Why not?”

“They’re dangerous.”

Jenny explained as much as she could about the rock while saying as little as she could about Abbie or Crane or the end of days. Laura didn’t need to be a part of that. Bare outlines would do just fine.

But Jenny forgot that the worst thing you could do was tempt Laura with vague details. Because that was just an invitation to investigate.

“And it’s still happening? The inside out, x-ray effect?” There was that spark of curiosity, as much a part of her face as her dimples.

“Comes and goes.” Jenny said it like an apology. Essentially, it was one.

But Laura was just getting going, entirely in her element deconstructing this unknown phenomenon. “Do you have to touch the rock to do it? Can you do it now?”

At the mere suggestion the walls came to life, pulsing with electricity. Jenny didn’t dare look anywhere but at her hands, at the tangled lines of blue, of red, the flashes of green between nerves. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s okay. I trust you.”

Jenny glanced up in surprise. Laura trusted her, after everything? Laura’s bright eyes flashed and behind them, thousands of tiny bursts of lightning lit her skull from the inside. Blood rushed to the surface of her cheeks, her lips, then her neck, and Jenny sensed how easy it would be to brush across her skin with her bizarro sixth sense, to send that rush of blood wherever she wanted it to go.

But no matter how much Laura trusted her to control it, she didn’t trust herself. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Laura. Again. So she cast about for something she could use for a demonstration.

She needed something filled with energy. Something electronic, or alive. Like the spider plant hanging in the corner in its cheap plastic pot.

“Okay,” Jenny said, squaring her shoulders with the plant. “Watch.”

As if Laura would look away from this.

Human bodies pulsed. Plant energy glowed. Jenny reached out her invisible hand – tentacle, if she was honest – and, brushing the edge of the closest leaf, sucked its life right out.

It shriveled.

Laura gasped. “Holy shit. That.” She took a step closer.

“Yeah.”

“I mean. How did you? It’s desiccated.” She reached out to feel it. The dead leaf crackled under her fingers.

Jenny was too busy noticing the plant’s energy glowing faintly in her skin. A dusting of green.

“This is so strange,” Laura murmured.

It was so intimate, so fragile. If there was ever a good time to apologize, this was it. “I know. Coming back here again, busting back into your life, after all this time?”

“I meant the plant.”

Nope, _that_ was fragile. The other comment had just been quiet. And now Jenny had stumbled into exactly the conversation she didn’t want to have. “Oh. Right.”

“But yes, you being here is also strange. Not bad, just. I mean, I was kind of hoping that at least I’d get to hold on to that skirt you brought back from Nepal.”

“If it helps, you can keep it,” Jenny mumbled, refusing to look Laura in the eye.

“It looked better on you anyway.” Laura quickly shook her head. “I mean, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you’re here.”

More miscommunication, maybe, because Jenny wasn’t here to rekindle anything. Even though Laura was just as intriguing now as she always had been, just as curious and brilliant and beautiful.

Laura continued, a little too loud. “Cause it’s been way too long since I had something this good to work on. But then, you always brought the best stuff.”

The awkwardness hung stagnant between them. Laura bit her lip, turning deliberately to her desk. “So. Magic energy rock. Rocks. Wow. I have so many questions.”

Jenny glared past Laura at the broken blue crystals. “I was really hoping more for answers.”

“Questions first.” Laura plopped herself down on the stool in front of her desk. She poked at the rocks with a pencil. “Can you get me my gloves? They’re in the --”

“Top drawer next to the Kleenex?”

“Can’t believe you remember.”

How could she forget? How could she forget any of it? Jenny dropped a pair of latex gloves next to the rocks.

Laura’s hands were as small as a child’s, petite and precise and stronger than they looked. Even the smallest latex gloves you could order were loose on her. She pulled them halfway up her forearm and picked up a rock. She peered at it under the light, shifting to see it from every angle. Then she took a look at the other one.

Silence settled in, as it always did when Laura sat down to work. Even in the middle of a conversation Laura would drift away, her mind too absorbed to spare a thought for what she wanted for dinner or when she’d be done. Or whether Jenny was leaving.

Or if she’d ever come back.

Sometimes Jenny appreciated the silence. She liked going to that still place where words weren’t necessary, could easily get wrapped up in cleaning a finicky old Winchester for hours. But there were times when Laura’s single-mindedness became an obstacle.

_Once, maybe two weeks after they started sleeping together, Jenny managed to distract Laura from her work. This time it was an Indo-Portuguese puzzle box Corbin needed opened. Jenny left her book on the couch and padded barefoot into Laura’s workroom until she was standing right behind her. Laura didn’t notice. Jenny stroked her ponytail, soft as an armful of feathers, and let her hands fall on Laura’s narrow shoulders._

_“Mmm, just a minute,” Laura protested._

_Jenny bent to press a kiss to the crown of Laura’s head. “It’s been three hours and twenty minutes. I fell asleep on the couch. Come to bed.”_

_“I’m doing this for you, if you’ll recall.” She did something fiddly with tweezers. “Give me a minute, I’ve almost got it.”_

_“I’ll give you ten seconds.”_

_Laura shook her head vaguely. “I’ll be useless till this is --”_

_Jenny scratched her nails lightly over the sensitive skin of Laura’s inner arm. “One.”_

_Laura shivered as her skin erupted in goosebumps, but she wouldn’t tear her eyes from the bronze box._

_Jenny gathered Laura’s ponytail, lifting it off the nape of her neck, and pressed another kiss, open-mouthed this time and with the hint of a lick, to the spot where wisps of hair gathered to a curling point at the top of her spine. “Two.”_

_Laura let out a soft, slow breath. “I promise, just give me a few more minutes.”_

_“Three,” Jenny whispered at her ear as she trailed her fingers over her collarbones to the line of buttons on Laura’s shirt. She twisted the top button open over her breasts and pulled the fabric apart, then found the next and the next until her shirt fell entirely open._

_“Those aren’t strictly seconds, you know.”_

_“You want me to speed up?”_

_Laura breathed a laugh. “No, I want you to stop so I can finish this.”_

_Jenny dragged Laura’s shirt over her shoulders, tugging her hands away from cold bronze plates and gears to pull it all the way off. “Four.” She let it fall on the floor at their feet. “Do you really want me to stop?”_

_Laura’s voice fell low and quiet. “Well, I mean, want is a strong word.”_

_“It really is,” Jenny simmered as she leaned in again, sucking at the hollow under Laura’s ear. “Five.”_

_Laura stretched up into Jenny with a hum. “But I do need to get this done,” Laura argued lamely._

_Jenny unhooked Laura’s bra and slipped it forward and off. “Need, uh-huh,” she murmured, lips moving over Laura’s neck, as she traced the lingering line of Laura’s bra around her sides to her breasts. Jenny’s hands feathered under them, cupping their weight. “Also a strong word.” Her fingers drifted over Laura’s nipples, now hard and tight. “Six,” Jenny counted, nibbling Laura’s earlobe. “And seven.”_

_Laura picked the box back up. “I don’t think I can work topless.”_

_“Then don’t.” Jenny stood up – Laura whimpered at the sudden loss – and carefully pulled the elastic band out of Laura’s hair. “Eight.” It fell in a fluffy cascade over her shoulders._

_“That’s just rude,” Laura complained._

_Jenny chuckled, circling Laura’s stool until she blocked the desk. She turned off Laura’s work light. “Is it?”_

_But Laura’s heavy eyelids hinted that she might not push Jenny away. Jenny slipped warm fingers along Laura’s jaw and around the back of her neck. She brushed the pad of her thumb over Laura’s ear, their gaze locked one to the other._

_Jenny let a deliciously tense stillness hover between them. “Nine,” Jenny finally whispered._

_Laura bit her lower lip in anticipation._

_And then Laura was up and off her stool, crushing her lips against Jenny’s open mouth, a kiss driven by the tantalizing fire of exploration and discovery. Laura stood on tiptoe, arms wound under Jenny’s shoulders, dragging Jenny down against her, kicking her stool out of the way, and then there was the empty bit of wall by the door and Laura, riled beyond what she could possibly ignore, pressed Jenny there, up against the wall, and kissed down her neck, unbuttoning her shirt and laying her chest bare, pushing aside the cup of her bra so she could tongue the hard nipple waiting inside._

_Jenny hissed, bowing her body taut._

_“So what’s ten?” Laura asked in a thick voice._

“Well,” Laura began, “it’s pretty easy to see, right here, exactly how it split.”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, grasping for the here and now. She swallowed hard. “But just holding the pieces together doesn’t fix me. I’m thinking it needs to be sealed, permanently.”

Laura turned to Jenny, folding her arms over her chest. “Why do you think fixing the stone will fix you?”

“I just do.”

“You know that’s not how science works.”

“Call it a hunch. When you fix that rock, the energy magic, creepy x-ray vision, death tentacles, all of it goes away. It’ll fix me.” Jenny scraped her teeth over her bottom lip. “It has to.”

Laura paused. She pressed the stones together again, then let them fall apart to their separate halves. “You’re not broken, Jenny. You don’t need fixing.”

Jenny slumped against the wall. “Well I sure as hell don’t intend to live like this forever. And putting humpty dumpty back together again is a place to start, at least.” She clenched her fists. The rock started it, the rock was the way to finish it. And only Laura could do it.

Laura watched Jenny simmer for a long moment. Her face was soft, a little worried. Kind. “I’ll do some tests. I could try a couple different epoxies. And charms, I mean, those will probably work better. But it’s going to take time.”

Jenny heaved a relieved sigh. “Yeah, that’s fine. I can come back in a few hours.”

“You’re not leaving me alone with these things,” Laura countered, raising an eyebrow. “They could be volatile. Especially without you.”

Jenny couldn’t argue. She didn’t know enough about what she – what _they_ – were dealing with. But she suspected that she was more dangerous than a couple of chipped crystals.

She felt Laura’s hand on her bicep. “Grab a book, gorgeous. You’re not going anywhere.”

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Every second with Laura reminded Jenny why they’d been so good together.

Every minute reminded her why their relationship had faded away.

Their silence was easy. Laura never was much for talking, and when she was deep in her work, words just disappeared. She communicated in faint “oohs” and “aahs” and tilts of her head and an excited slap of her hand against the workbench. It was adorable. At first.

But Laura’s silences dragged on. Hour upon hour she dug deeper into herself and the mysteries of the universe. She became as withdrawn as a turtle tucked up in its shell. As hard as Jenny tried, she couldn’t sneak in or break in or sweet talk her way in. She was always on the outside, calling to a shadow. That was their problem. They were both too good at disappearing. Jenny literally – she’d hop a plane and disappear to the farthest, most inaccessible corners of the world. But Laura? She could do it without moving a muscle.

She poured everything she had into solving mechanical mysteries, and there wasn’t room for much else. Not even her ex-girlfriend skulking around her apartment, trying very hard not to blow anything up.

But Jenny was fine. Really. If she’d learned anything from being locked up all those years, it was patience. You wait to be processed. Wait to be told where to go. What to do. Wait for meals and meds and therapy. Whether it’s jail or a psych ward, institutional life is one meticulously choreographed ballet of waiting.

At first you find the little milestones in the everyday. Learn to tell time by the rattle of the meal cart or the minutes until the dull numbness of the meds kicks in. But then time stops mattering all together. It becomes another abstract concept, like “freedom” or “sanity.” It just slides on past. Time doesn’t bother you. And you don’t bother it.

So Jenny learned how to let her eyes go hazy and indistinct while her mind whirred. Knew how to let her thoughts drift instead of rampage.

Of course, she had more freedom here than she’d had in lockup. She could walk around and look at the awesomely weird stuff that cluttered Laura’s apartment – dusty artifacts and space-age things with blinking lights and more wires than any one person could possibly need and a small but exquisite collection of orchids, all swooping whorls and inward curls.

She could let her fingers wander over books with titles like _Operator Methods in Quantum Mechanics_ , and _Unlocking the Antikythera Mechanism_ , and dozens of back issues of _Popular Mechanics_.

There were weirder choices, of course. Sometimes, in the increasingly rare periods when her mind was clear, she missed the writhing magic that was quickly becoming her world. It was disturbing and distracting, but it was beautiful, too. She found that by letting her eyes fall just so and imagining a feeling of reaching, she could summon it up, watch the way those orchids drank in the sunlight and turned it to glittering energy; watch the way Laura’s heart sped up every time the scientist thought she had hit a breakthrough.

At last, Jenny stopped wandering the apartment and perched on the rickety-legged stool behind Laura. “I always loved watching you work,” she murmured, more to herself than anything. Laura’s hands stilled over the sticky concoction she was mixing together. It was more response than she usually got out of the woman when she was at work, so Jenny continued: “You’re always so sure. No false moves. No fumbling. Graceful.”

“I’ve had my fumbles,” Laura said. Her voice ground faintly with disuse. “You remember the codex incident."

“Please, like I’m gonna forget that? Your face was dyed purple for a week.”

“You wouldn’t stop calling me ‘Barney.’”

They laughed, and God Laura had a beautiful laugh and –

Jenny’s phone buzzed. She wanted to ignore it. She was going to fucking ignore it. Because things were almost just like they ought to be and she wasn’t going to be cockblocked by a phone.

But then she recognized the pattern of the buzzes. Three short. One long. Abbie. “I need to take this.”

“Of course you do.” Her voice was already distant again. Remote.

“It’s my sister.”

Laura’s face softened at that. “You two are talking again?”

Jenny nodded and slipped from the room. “Abs. What’s up?”

“We’re on our way to torch some zombies. Crane, no. Don’t light that. Not here. We will literally explode. Go wait in the car, please.”

Jenny leaned against the wall, watching blood pulse around her cuticles. They could go on like this for a while.

“Sorry about that,” Abbie said at last. “Anyway, we think we’ve found their nest. Hoping we can wipe ‘em out and that’ll be that. How’re you holding up?”

“Better, I think. I’m at a friend’s.”

A pause. Something clanked in the background. “You think that’s safe?”

“I think she can help me. She might be the only one who can help me.”

“She knows about you? About us?”

“Parts of it. More about me than you. Tried to keep you out of it. But I knew her before. We’ve been through a lot together.” Jenny glanced toward the workshop door. “I trust her.”

A sigh. “If you trust her, then okay. Maybe it’s better you’re not at your place. Harder to track you there.So you just hang tight there until you hear from me. Sound good?”

“Wish I were out there fighting zombies with you.”

“Nobody I’d rather have at my back than you, Jenny. You know that. And as soon as you feel ready, that’s where I want you. Whether you’re fixed or not.” She muffled the phone. Said something to Crane. “Look, I need to go, but when you say friend, do you mean –“

“I mean good luck. Talk to you later. Love you.”

“Always.” Click.

Jenny watched the sound crackle out of her phone. She slumped. Her body missed fighting. The ache and pain and cracking connection of flesh on flesh. The rush. All of this magic crap was so in her head. Not that Jenny didn’t think when she fought – of course she did. But her thoughts fueled action. Now she was just trying not to hurt anyone.

But no matter what Abbie said, Jenny knew she wouldn’t be safe until she was fixed. It was better for her to be here.

She started to go back to Laura. To see if she could rekindle that one laughing moment. But the hunched round of Laura’s back, curled like a comma over her workbench, stopped her. Laura was deep in the work. Her brain sparkled like a Christmas tree as she made connections, explored new leads. Her cheeks glowed.  
She was never happier than when she was in the work. Jenny would let her stay there as long as she could.

Jenny retreated. She did pushups. One handed. Left, then right, then left again. Sit-ups until her abs ached. Door presses. Anything to keep her moving and keep her from thinking.

She made Laura lunch. If she didn’t, the scientist wouldn’t eat. She’d just keep working and working until her eyes grew too heavy and her fingers started to lag. So Jenny scoured the poorly-stocked kitchen and wound up with scrambled eggs served with endless glugs of hot sauce and toast from bread a breath away from spouting mold. The magic fizzed to life and showed Jenny ghostly, spore-y shadows in the dough.

Jenny was just tipping the eggs onto a chipped china plate when she heard it. A drag-scrape noise, rhythmic. Repeating. Almost a footstep but not quite. Closer. Closer. And a smell that was more than a smell, was something that invaded her whole head with a rank sweetness.

“Laura. Lock this door. And don’t come out no matter what.” Jenny eased the door to the workroom closed.

Laura didn’t answer. Jenny hadn’t expected her to. She squared her shoulders and drew her Desert Eagle .50.

The front door exploded inward.

Two things scrambled through the wreckage. Maybe they’d been a man and a woman once, but now they were more rot than human. Their skin was gray and slack, dotted through with holes and tears. Their eyes were gone. Just orbital sockets with dangling nerves. Pieces of nose were torn away to reveal glimpses of skull. But they were dressed in impeccable black suits and crisp white shirts. The man’s tie was knotted in a perfect Windsor.

And somehow, none of that was the worst part. The very worst part, the part that made Jenny almost heave all over the eggs, was the blackness coursing through them. Instead of the life and movement inside every person, there was a roiling black ooze. She knew in her guts that that was what kept them alive. Alive. Heh. Wrong word. Right principle.

They moaned like a clatter of bones. Jenny heaved the plate of eggs at the man-thing, which did about as much damage as you’d expect a plate of eggs to do. But then she emptied her first clip right into his head. Zombie movies and one unpleasant encounter in Haiti meant she knew how to treat zombies. Take out the brain, take out the zomb.

There wasn’t much of a head left after all those bullets, more of a mashed-in cantaloupe. But that melon-headed fucker just kept coming.

“Okay. You’re not a zombie,” Jenny muttered. “What the hell are you?”

Eject clip. Another, fished from one of her billion cargo pockets. Center of mass this time.

Same effect. Ugly, gaping holes. Still-advancing monster. And while she was busy dealing with Thing 1, Thing 2 had shambled by her and was headed down the hall.

“Laura! Bar the door!”

Not even Laura was self-absorbed enough to ignore two solid bursts of gunfire. But Jenny still didn’t hear scrambling and scrabbling inside the lab as Laura shoved furniture against it. She just heard a high, tinny noise.

Jenny couldn’t get around the headless, holey monster in front of her. It mirrored her every step. And the other monster was getting closer and closer to Laura.  
There was no more time. No more bullets. The thing scrabbled for her with torn and broken fingers. Jenny raised a fist, but the thing touched her first.  
The world went black.

No, literally fucking black. She was inside the monster , swimming through that noxious goo. It was colder and deeper than a January night. It smelled like frozen roadkill, the crisp cold blocking the sweet smell of decay underneath. It swirled around her, pulled at her, tugged her into the numbing dark.  
But she wasn’t going without a goddamn fight.

The blackness. That had to be the key. She’d killed Crane – temporarily – by touching the glowing coal of his heart. There was definitely no glowing here. But what if she could get rid of that tar-like goo?

Fuck it. It’d have to work. She didn’t have time to come up with a better theory with a shambling horror advancing on her. Jenny seized that black ooziness in her not-hands . It was slick and frigid. She instinctively recoiled – she needed that shit off.

But when she snapped back into herself, the darkness clung along. It shuffled beneath her skin and beat against her blood, tinging everything with sickly decay.  
But the zombie fell to the floor. Just a ruined corpse.

Jenny collapsed. It was like someone was turning off the lights on each internal organ. Flip, liver. Flip, left kidney. Flip, did she really need a spleen anyway?  
She crawled. Hand over hand she pulled herself down the hall. To Laura. Scared Laura, Laura who knew how to mend anything but could destroy nothing. Laura who had the rock, the only thing they could want. Before the last light flickered out – flip, right kidney, flip, gall bladder – she had to save Laura. Whatever happened, it was okay if she was.

The workroom door was open. The shadows glommed thickly around her heart. She dragged herself forward even though she knew what she would find. Blood and gray brains matted in that thick hair. Eyes slack. Tiny gloved hands motionless for once. Forever. And still that thing would come for Jenny, clutching the rocks in its rotting claws.

Jenny crawled around the corner into the workroom just in time to see Laura – whose skull was not cracked open, who was not cowering, whose lip curled into a disdainful snarl – fling a fistful of powder at the zombie.

Its flesh smoked, flaked, and drifted away on the faint breeze from the AC. The dumb thing must have realized its own demise, must have had some faint muscle memory of what to do in situations like this. It herkily jerked around, flailing and batting at the invisible flames until it fell, grinding itself onto the carpet as if driven by a faint memory of stop, drop, and roll.

It didn’t work. Soon, only splintered bone and melted earrings – gold – remained.

“Jenny? What the hell?” Laura crashed down beside her, and before Jenny could warn her away, had her pulled into her lap like some bloodless pieta.

“What was that stuff?” The blackness was globbing in front of her eyes now. They were almost beautiful, the dancing shadows. Peaceful.

“Chemical composition of – shit, it doesn’t matter. What happened? What’s wrong? There’s not a scratch on you.” Small fingers pressed against her throat. Adrenaline curdled just over Laura’s kidneys. Jenny wanted to soothe that panic away with a caress. Didn’t want Laura to worry. Not about her. Not again. But Jenny couldn’t risk tainting her.

“I took it. The dark. It went into me…” Jenny pulled Laura’s hand from her neck. Pressed their palms together. They always used to do this, marveling at the size difference. At how perfectly they fit together. “I’m proud of you. Laura. You always find a way.”

“We are not doing this deathbed thing.” Gently – oh but God it still hurt – she eased Jenny to the floor. And she was gone.

Flip. The world went dark. “Laura.” The name came out a pathetic whimper. Jenny wasn’t scared of dying. She’d fought hard and she’d fought on the side of angels. She knew where she was headed. But didn’t want to die alone. Slipping out of this world unnoticed, no one beside her, no hand to hold, just blackness inside and outside and where was Laura?

“Listen. You need to get out of here. Take the stone to—“ Jenny coughed a violent rasp. “To the sheriff’s department. Leave it for Abbie. Then you go. Drive and don’t stop, Laura. You can’t stop.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?”  
Jenny laughed, but it turned into another cough. This one hurt worse. “No. For once, no. Just go. I’m sorry I brought this to your door. But you have to go.”

Laura’s hand wrapped around hers. Tight. Hard. Something cold pressed against her lips. “I’ll go as soon as you drink this. All of it.”

What did it matter now if Jenny drank or didn’t drink? If it would get Laura on her way, she’d do it. She parted her lips. The stuff slid down her throat, thick and pulpy and tasting of limes and aspirin.

Jenny coughed.

Sputtered.

Puked.

But it wasn’t half-digested food and bile. It was that metaphysical blackness. It spouted out of her like the fourth plague, all putridness and flies.  
It seemed to go on forever, until Jenny was hollowed and empty. She moaned and rolled onto her side, trembling with the aftershocks of whatever the holy fuck that had been.

Laura spooned around her. And Jenny was too weak – in every sense of the word – to pull away.

“What did you do?”

“It worked, right? It’s based on pretty solid pharmacology and shamanic studies. But I’ve only ever seen it discussed theoretically, so I wasn’t sure if the application would –“

_“What did you do?”_

Laura huffed a soft breath against her neck as she tried to translate her genius into words Jenny would understand. “Think of it as a spiritual purgative.”

“You made me puke up zombie juice.” Her vision was clearing. First the lines of magic grew brighter – electricity, the verdant shine of growing things, the pulse of blood in Laura’s hands. Then the rest of the world sketched in around it. “You saved me.”

“In a technical sense, you saved me first. Then I saved you.” A pause. “Twice.”

Jenny closed her eyes. Laura was so soft. So warm. She smelled familiar, but there was something new. A new lotion, maybe. New confidence. “I’m going to lay here for one minute. And then you and me, we have to get out of here.”

“Take as long as you need.”

One minute stretched into two. Jenny wished it could ease on forever. But there were two corpses and she’d just fired a whole bunch of shots and the neighbors might wonder about that and oh yeah: those things weren’t going to stop until they had what they’d come for. 

Jenny pushed herself to her feet. The world twirled dangerously, but she stood firm. She scooped up the rocks from the table, then held out her other hand to Laura. “I’m sorry.”

Laura gave one longing look at her work bench. She gathered up a few things – little tools and packets of things and wire. Why did she always need wire? Then she took Jenny’s hand. “Let’s run.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Jenny was hair-trigger twitchy. The engine roared in protest as they sped down Taconic Parkway.

Where could they go? If the Undead Brigade had found her at Laura’s, all the usual hiding places would be out. The cabin or her apartment were too dumb to even consider -- dammit, if they went to her place, they’d better not smash her claw foot tub. But even her secondary hidey holes were probably bad ideas. No hunkering down with the doomsday preppers or at Big Ash’s garage.

And worst of all, she had a _civilian_ to worry about.

The dashboard cast a ghostly green glow over Laura’s eyes.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Jenny told them both.

Laura heaved a sigh, leaning back to stare up at the ceiling. “I should have grabbed my tool kit. I was so busy making more vomit juice. How could I forget my tool kit?”

“We’ve got vomit juice and wire. We’re set for life.” Jenny sniffed. “We’ll be okay.”

She could say it twenty more times and it would still be a pale, thin lie. The freeway was too exposed and the SUV behind them was following just close enough to be worrisome. She needed an exit. Here: Peekskill Hollow. Middle of fucking nowhere. Perfect. Jenny suddenly swerved; the SUV kept going.

She rubbed her eyes, then her whole face. She wanted a sink and some cold water. And a burger. And more ammo, and a place to sleep off whatever it was Laura had done. Sure, it had saved both their asses, but it still felt weird as fuck. Like doing cocaine while you’re still hungover – amped to the max and nauseated at the same time.

Laura shifted in her seat to face Jenny. “So those were zombies.”

“Seems that way,” Jenny shrugged.

“But _how_ are they zombies? That’s really the question. What’s the mechanism? Disease vector? Voodoo charm? Are they possessed?”

“No idea.”

“Zombies though. Not as rare as you’d think, because there’re so many ways to make one. Which makes it that much harder to deal with them. I wish I’d gotten a sample before we left.”

“A sample?” Jenny cringed. She didn’t want to know.

“They were pretty juicy looking, probably could have just scooped out a spoonful.”

“Jesus!”

Laura rolled her eyes. “So now you’re squeamish?”

Jenny glanced at Laura, then back to the road. Laura’s face glowed, and not from magic. Or the lights in the dashboard. No, she glowed with the playful curiosity Jenny found so irresistible. Way back when. “Let’s just hope you don’t get another chance for a scoop,” she countered, biting back a grin.

Between the Alpine Lodge and the Deer Holler Camp Ground, the road was starting to look familiar. When she saw the sign for Roaring Brook Lake, she knew: JP, her old friend (and once drunken grope session but that was a long time ago, water under the bridge) used to run a motel nearby. Hadn’t talked to him for at least three years. But if she was lucky, he would welcome them both with a beer, a bed, and a bag of bullets for the road.

Two beds. Two beds would be better.

Large swaths of forest rose like walls on either side of the road. No lights behind them, not for at least a mile.

“Eventually, one of us is going to have to pee,” Laura said, out of nowhere. “Probably me. We are going to have to stop running eventually.”

“You can sit at your workbench for eight hours straight, but in mid-getaway you need a bathroom?”

“When I’m working, I’m absorbed. Now, my brain is just spinning and we just passed that sign for Roaring Brook lake so now all I can think about are faucets. Rivers. Waterfalls.”

That won a faint smile from Jenny. “Don’t worry, we’re almost there.”

“We have a _there_? Where?”

“Motel by that lake. Guy who runs it’s – I know him.”

As if on cue, they rounded a bend and there it was: the Lion’s Roar Motel and Café. The sign flickered, more off than on. She turned into the driveway, wheels slipping on the gravel.

“Café?” Laura asked. “Swanky.”

“Not even close,” Jenny told her, cutting the engine. “But there’s a fryer and some version of chili going pretty much non-stop.”

They both swung their doors open. “Is it good?” Laura asked, stretching into a stand.

Jenny slammed her door. “Depends on how hungry you are.”

A few lights were on inside. Just one car besides hers – she didn’t recognize it, but she hoped it was JP’s. Otherwise, the place seemed pretty deserted. She led the way to the outside door marked _Employees Only_ and knocked.

The door swung in. “Jenny Mills,” said a smug JP, leaning against the threshold. “Always knew you’d be back.”

This was not the time for his half smile or his eyebrows. Just not. And Laura’s eyes were burning a dozen questions into the back of her neck. “Go fuck yourself,” she said cheerfully. “Can we come inside?”

He stepped to the side, barely making room for Jenny. Laura followed.

All six feet and change of JP leaned against the edge of his desk, folding enough to highlight a new paunch. “Who’s your friend?”

“Dr. Nuñez,” Laura volunteered, an edge to her voice. Pulling rank. Jenny bit the corner of her lip to keep from grinning.

JP shot Jenny a questioning look.

“We need to stay here tonight,” Jenny muttered.

“Generally why people pull in.”

“And we need ammo.”

His expression narrowed. “A secondary reason at best. What’s going on?”

Jenny gave him a level glare. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

There was that eyebrow again.

“Look,” she tried again, “we just need some sleep and any firepower you can spare when we leave tomorrow morning.”

“Will I be lying to police about you?”

Jenny folded her arms across her chest, mirroring him. “Why, you suddenly grow a conscience?”

They stared each other down for a long moment, until Laura cleared her throat. “Look, some of us have to pee. I have a credit card and you seem far from full up tonight. Room, please.”

Jenny turned to Laura, fishing a roll of smooth, non-sequential bills from a deep, hidden pocket in her vest. “Thanks,” she said, “but you don’t finance a getaway with a credit card.” She spun to face JP, placing the whole roll in his open palm.

JP thumbed the cash. “You could buy every room in the place with this. Twice.”

“Consider it a down payment on some big, boomy weaponry.”

Upstairs in their room – one queen bed, _very funny, asshole_ – Laura started talking through the bathroom door before she was even done peeing. “So, JP. Kind of a dick.”

Jenny smiled to herself. He was, uncharacteristically so, in that jealous ex-boyfriend attitude he had no right to adopt. “Well,” she began, looking for a credible excuse, “he likes to be in charge. He’s not fundamentally bad. Just didn’t like not knowing.”

“He _loved_ me,” she sang sarcastically, over a flush.

Another grin, because Laura had been just as guilty. “I’d say the feeling was mutual, _Dr. Nuñez_.”

The sink turned on, then off. “Perhaps,” she hedged, opening the door. “But if you vouch for him, then I will give him and his chili a chance.”

All they had with them was Jenny’s bag of rocks, tucked safely in her jeans’ front pocket, and a plastic Delgado’s grocery bag with a jam jar full of vomit juice and some thin wire. There was nothing to unpack, nothing to distract them from the one bed and its shiny peach quilted cover. Tiny speckles of life glittered in Jenny’s magical vision; she tried very hard not to wonder if they were syphilis, gonorrhea, or recent jizz stains. Laura stood in the doorway of the bathroom, the bright light glowing from behind her into the otherwise dark room, and glared at it.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Jenny said, glancing at the hard loveseat.

Laura turned her glare at Jenny. “What? No. We need actual rest, both of us but you especially. We can share a bed. It’s not like we’re in danger of snuggling.”

There was noise downstairs. JP’s voice, muffled but loud, and then a crash.

Laura froze. “What’s that?”

Jenny put her finger to her lips, listening intently. But it wasn’t the sound that she recognized, it was the smell. The rank, invasive stench of zombies.

Then JP screamed, a loud bellow cut suddenly short.

“Shit,” she muttered, reaching into her waistband for her useless gun. It was better than nothing though. Sort of.

“More zombies,” Laura said, her face twisting. She smelled it too.

Jenny motioned for Laura to fall in behind her, her eyes wide, and took three silent steps to the door. “Just stay behind me,” she whispered.

“Not gonna ask me to wait here?”

“I want you close,” she said, opening the door, cringing at the squeak. Could zombies even hear? Better assume they could. Better assume they could do everything.

Jenny could hear their drag and squelch up the stairs. She knew the sound now, the scrape of shoes and then that unmistakable, inert squish. One of the top ten worst sounds in the world.

She turned her head, mouthing _they’re right there_ to Laura and pointing to the stairs.

Jenny stood in the middle of the hallway, Laura right behind her. She pointed her gun at the top of the stairs.

“I wish I had something to hurt ‘em with,” Laura whispered behind Jenny’s ear.

Jenny was turning to look over her shoulder at Laura when the zombies suddenly roared and then there they were, mounting the last step and turning the corner. Same crisp suits, same empty eye sockets. But these were bigger. Two big men – used to be men, anyway. One slightly shorter and stockier, the other crazy tall. A linebacker and a basketball player. Great.

Jenny braced herself. Could she take them out this time, both of them? And without letting her skin touch them? The gun wasn’t going to do much good, and anyway it would be hard to bash without skin contact. Basketball zombie staggered toward them. Jenny threw her Desert Eagle hard at his face. It caught his lip and tore a gash across his cheek, but it didn’t stop him. Only now he had a sickeningly giant half smile that exposed tendon, teeth, and pock-marked gums. Yeah, much better.

She cast around for another weapon. Beside them was a vanity table with a vase full of dusty fake flowers and an even dustier glass bowl, cut to look like crystal. “Here,” she said, grabbing both and handing Laura the vase.

Jenny held the bowl in two hands. Smash upward to pop his head like a plastic bottle top? Crash it down on his skull? Throw it like a fucking Frisbee?

He lumbered closer, Jenny standing her ground. Laura too, bouncing a little on her feet. Jenny could see he was way too tall for anything but the bottle top pop. “Here goes,” she muttered, and took two big steps to meet him. She swung upward with everything she had.

Basketball zombie’s head popped clean off. Not clean, not at all – strands of tendon and vein and decaying muscle hung limply out of the top of his neck. The long body staggered and fell against the wall.

While Jenny held the bowl, her breath heaving, watching the body slump there, football zombie lurched into action. It drag-squelched quicker and launched itself at Laura, but she was ready, holding the vase above her head. With one final step, she reached up on tiptoe and tried to bring it crashing down on his head.

She got his face instead, all of it. Wiped it right off his skull. He fell to his knees with the force of it.

But newly headless basketball zombie was recovering fast, and suddenly he threw himself at Jenny. He grabbed her by the biceps and push-walked her back against the rickety bannister, kicking the base of one of the spindles right behind her. The railing creaked.

Laura had the other one by the hair, clutching it by the roots. “I’ve got you now, you dead fuck,” she taunted through gritted teeth.

It groaned, lurching away from her and leaving her with a handful of hair still connected to its bloody, rotting scalp.

This was it. They were both going to die unless they could kill them. Which was impossible. So Jenny had to go in. “Bring yours over here,” Jenny yelled past the hulk trying to bend her in half the wrong way.

Laura was now running up and down the hallway, playing chicken with football zombie. “You can’t take two at once!”

“I’m going in.”

“Okay, hypothetically I should be able to save you, but there’s a chance it won’t work. You could die!”

“I’ll take the odds. Come on!”

Jenny’s pile of stinky meat was inching his hands up over her shoulders to her neck. Here it comes, she thought, and then came the black. Not a moment later, she heard a crack and felt football zombie slump against her, his loose ear sliding over her cheek. Another layer of black, roiling together now, mixing inside her. She reached her not-hands out into it, into _them_ , gritted her teeth, and pulled.

The two corpses fell in heaps at her feet, now just carcasses.

She didn’t want to fall on them but she could feel her liver switching off, her kidneys, her pancreas. Not much time left. She tried to step over the squishy corpses, tried to lift her leg high enough but couldn’t. And there went her lungs. She tripped and fell forward on her face.

Then Laura was there, beautiful, kind, good Laura, turning her over, cradling her. She pressed the cold glass to her lips. “It’s going to be enough,” she whispered as she opened Jenny’s lips and poured. “I made enough. You’re alive. You’re alive. You have to be.”

Jenny let the chalky liquid pool in the back of her throat and then down, down, swallowing it all. Once it was gone her entire body convulsed, and she curled to her side and hurled.

It was better this time. Well, it was less awful. She knew what to expect, at least.

She lay there, Laura’s warm hand on her shoulder, and puked and puked and puked until there was nothing left.

“You’re okay,” Laura soothed. She stroked Jenny’s hair, and even with the puking, Jenny wished they could stay like this. Be like this. “You’re okay.”

It was way too quiet. Besides the two of them, Jenny couldn’t sense any life in the building at all.

Then she remembered. “JP,” Jenny gasped.

Laura shook her head. “Don’t, not yet. You’re not _that_ okay.”

“He could be dead,” Jenny told her, scrambling up to standing. She stood motionless for a second, conjuring balance. Digging deep for strength. “Your stuff works. I’m fine. Come on.”

Laura stood slowly, scrutinizing her patient. “Fine.” She pointed to the second step. “Then go slow, and don’t forget your gun.”

Jenny grabbed it and motioned for Laura to follow her. Silence howled at Jenny where the buzzing energy of JP’s life should have been.

In the hallway downstairs, ancient oil paintings of sailboats hang at odd angles. There was a hole in the wall at face-height the size of a fist.

She stopped, held her arm out to stop Laura too, and listened. Nothing.

Fluorescent light spilled into the hallway from the office. Jenny slid to the side of the threshold and, after a deep breath, pivoted into the room, pointing her useless gun in front of her.

JP lay twisted across his desk, half his face crumpled in, clots of dark blood where his eye once was. Smears of pink in his hair.

His fucking brain. Jesus.

The room was ransacked, she realized. Papers everywhere. Blood everywhere. The shitty oil painting of an evergreen valley was pushed aside and the empty safe behind it hung open.

Burglar zombies?

“Shit.” Laura’s voice was small behind her.

Jenny pushed her out of the room. “More could be coming. We have to get out of here,” she said, already halfway down the hall.

Laura caught Jenny’s shoulder on the way to the car. “Keys,” she demanded.

“I can drive,” Jenny protested.

“So can I,” Laura argued, plucking them right out of her palm.

Jenny’s Magic-o-Vision flared in the silence of the car. Laura was a pulsing, liquid thing in the driver seat, but then, Jenny’s own hands, balled into fists in her lap, thumped and swelled with blood just as desperately. Jenny squeezed her eyes closed hard, but it didn’t make a difference: the desk and the blood and _his goddamn face_ were still there. And the car was just as terrifying, transparent combustion boiling inside the engine, electrical currents like a fiery skeleton surrounding them both. The dash was unrecognizable, ordinary dials for RPM and speed barely visible over the thicket of wires and sparks behind them.

The engine whined in weak protest. Jenny could feel the intensity of Laura’s determination coming off her in waves. Probably best that Laura took the keys; Jenny was still shaking. Hell, she was shaking more _now_ than when they’d found JP, just a chewed up mess of skin and blood, so much blood, too much blood…

Jenny watched Laura drive.

“What?” Laura finally asked, as her capillaries dilated, stretching for the surface, and a flush of blood bloomed under her cheek.

“Nothing, I’m just.” Jenny trained her eyes on the road with a shaky breath. “I’m gonna try Abbie.” She dug out her phone and pressed 1 on speed dial.

“You know what to do.” Abbie’s voicemail.

Damn. “Hey, so those zombie fuckers are no joke. Couple more found us where we were trying to hide out.” Jenny swallowed. “Call me when you can. And watch your back.”

Voicemail was completely unsatisfying. She dropped her phone in an inside pocket of her jacket.

“You okay?” Laura asked, hazarding a long look.

She wanted to tell her yes, she was fine but she just wanted to find someplace safe. And that it was her fault. And that the car could give out going fast for too long. And that what they needed was an all-night Walmart with a weapons section.

She wanted to tell her no, they needed help but she was not going to be responsible for any more friends dying, that she didn’t have anywhere else for them to go. And that being with her was great in a bad way and distracting as hell.

In the end, she didn’t answer.

At the ramp for Highway 9, Laura pressed the gas pedal all the way down. Speed was good, cleansing somehow. The highway stretched dark and empty in front of them.

Jenny rolled her tight shoulders. “Let me know when you want a break.”

Laura shook her head. “I think we both need one.”

They passed a sign. Danbury: 43 miles. Albany: 103 miles. Boston: 200 miles.

“So. Boston.” Didn’t matter what her response was. She knew they had to go.

“Way too far. That’s almost three hours.”

“I’ll drive, you can sleep on the way,” Jenny assured her.

“Yeah, and let you crash us into a tree? You’re more beat than I am.”

“We don’t have much of a choice.”

Laura squinted into the night, biting her lip.

“Actually, we do. There’s an old pharmaceutical factory, outside of Danbury. Allorex. Used to order chemical supplies from them, but they closed a few years ago. Which sucked because they didn’t charge much extra for overnighting, but I eventually found a pretty good supplier out in Montana… anyway, from what I hear nothing ever moved into their space.”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, that was the last of the vomit juice, which we need to keep you alive if we run into any more zombies. Plus there’s the whole actual-solving-of-the-problem polymer issue, for which I need a whole array of chemical goodness, and I’m thinking we should be using my anti-zombie powder to kill zombies from now on instead of Jenny the Magic Zombie Vacuum. So how about we drive by, see if it’s as abandoned as we hope it is. If not, we suck it up and head to Boston. But if it is, we hunker down and I do some constructive pillaging.”

“You got keys?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot how to pick a lock, Jenny Mills.”

* * *

 

It wasn’t much of a factory. A low mid-century brick building, overgrown front lawn. Light box sign long since punched out. Jenny followed the driveway around to the back. Outside a corrugated garage door were about a dozen oil stains, a rusting dumpster, and some empty bottles of Dark Eyes vodka. A dense patch of forest butted up to the back parking lot.

Jenny passed Laura her gun. “Watch my back.” Laura held the gun like it was a scorpion, but it was better protection than nothing.

Jenny knelt at the door. There had once been a card swipe, but the cover and guts had long since been salvaged. Without that security, it was a pretty basic lock. She could make quick work of it. Laura stood behind her, scanning the woods.

“How’s it look?”

“Spooky as fuck.”

Jenny laughed just as the tumbler caught.

It was almost pitch black inside. No electricity anywhere; the building was completely cut off. Jenny pulled out her phone and held the face up. It wasn’t really enough light, but it was something.

“See? Toolkit. Damn. I have a flashlight in there,” Laura said. “And hand sanitizer.”

Jenny smiled to herself. She always loved how smart and self-deprecating Laura was. Resourceful. Tough. There was a reason they weren’t together anymore, but for the life of her she couldn’t think what it was.

Jenny panned her phone’s glow left to right. A large, empty warehouse of a room. A desk near the door, small and bare. “I wouldn’t call it cozy.”

“Well, it’s no bed and breakfast in Poughkeepsie, but it appears to be zombie-free.”

Jenny felt the guilt wash through her. “I’m sorry, Laura.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Kitschy, a little overenthusiastic about roses, but the coffee was good.”

“Not for Poughkeepsie. For bringing you into this. For putting you in danger.”

“Look, don’t apologize for bringing me the most interesting puzzle I’ve gotten since...”

They were both silent, the words _since you left_ hanging unsaid between them.

On the second floor they found what must have been a break room. Unlike the rest of the place, this room had only one door. Which made it defensible. A quick phone pan also revealed a wall of cabinets, a couple of molded plastic chairs, a high window, and a Naugahyde couch.

“This’ll do,” Jenny said, ushering Laura inside.

They pushed a chair against the door. “Does this really work?” Laura asked, wedging it under the knob.

“Nope,” Jenny told her, trying for a smirk.

Jenny rifled through the cabinets, but there wasn’t much there: a short pile of take-out napkins, three packets of non-dairy creamer, a plastic-wrapped spork.

It was fine. Once the sun came up, they’d scour the place for whatever Laura needed, then head out to meet Abbie and Ichabod in Boston. For now, all they needed was a secure place to sleep.

Jenny lowered herself onto the couch, testing its integrity slowly. In a moment, Laura was beside her. “Silver lining, we don’t have to fight over the bed now.”

Jenny’s only response was a slow blink.

“Listen, I’m sorry about JP.”

But Jenny resisted calling the picture to mind. “Yup,” she said instead, huddling lower into the corner of the couch. She was heavily, deeply tired, the kind of tired that pulls at you like a riptide.

“You’re shivering.”

“It’s cold.”

“Not really. Not like – are you sure you’re okay?”

Jenny didn’t respond, because that riptide was stronger than she was. Its swirling currents tugged at her: the zombie juice purge, her shock at JP and her panic over possibly getting Laura killed and this _thing_ that kept sparking with Laura and oh yeah, also the fact that Jenny was now _magic_ and it wouldn’t stop, none of it would stop and she was going to drown.

“Just need some sleep,” Jenny mumbled.

“I’ll stay up and keep watch. I wish I had something to wrap you up in. You look cold.”

“I’ll be fine.”

But Laura set her palm on Jenny’s shoulder and tugged her close. “Come ‘ere,” she murmured.

And Jenny melted into her lap, too exhausted, too done to fight. She felt Laura feather fingertips across her cheek once, twice before sleep took her.

* * *

 

Jenny jerked awake but the room was still deep dark, faint starlight only a wisp of light above her head. She was lying on her side, warm and snug on plastic.

Laura was behind her, her right arm slung over Jenny’s waist, her left bent under Jenny’s head. She was so peaceful, and Jenny was so warm, she couldn’t even muster the energy to be mad Laura had fallen asleep instead of keeping watch like any sane person would. It was just nice, this. Safe when safety was hard to come by.

She listened. What had woken her up? The place was silent. She lifted her head to hear better.

Still nothing.

She took a deep breath through her nose. No trace of the sickening rot.

Stirring slightly behind her, Laura clutched her closer.

Lying here with Laura was a bad idea, after everything that had happened, everything they had done. But it felt good. More than good, it felt right.

Or just familiar. It used to feel right. That was all.

But she relished it all anyway: the way Laura’s breasts pressed against her back, the way Laura’s wide hips framed hers, her knees tucked against Jenny’s thighs.

The responsible thing would be to get up and check the building again. Figure out what woke her up.

The responsible thing would be to stop being the little spoon before it got out of hand.

But she was warm and more at ease than she’d been for a long time, so instead she tried to listen hard to the night, to the building and, inevitably, to Laura’s breath. She laid her head back onto Laura’s arm. Laura exhaled a contented sigh.

Then Laura started, sitting half up, almost pushing Jenny right off the couch. “What is it?”

“Nothing, shhh,” Jenny whispered, snuggling back against her as Laura lay back down. It wasn’t exactly a lie. It _was_ probably nothing.

But Laura had been on high alert for too long to be cooed back to sleep so easily. “You sure?”

“Ninety-eight percent sure.” She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Laura lying there, scared, while Jenny slept. Or worse, going off alone to investigate. “Want me to check?”

Laura shifted her arm over Jenny’s hip again. “Does it involve you getting up?”

Jenny smiled in the darkness. “Pretty much.”

“Then fuck it.”

Laura lay there, her breath slowing again, but Jenny sensed a grin on her lips, too. Then Laura pressed a long peck into Jenny’s shoulder.

“What was that for?” Jenny asked in spite of herself. The answer could only complicate everything even more. And yet.

Laura was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said.

They lay silent, barely breathing, warm and close. Jenny thought maybe Laura had gone back to sleep.

“For coming back,” Laura finally whispered.

“I should have come back right after Tibet. We could have worked it out.”

Laura kissed Jenny’s shoulder again. Jenny leaned into it this time. “I should have called you. I knew when you were coming back.”

Jenny shook her head. “I could have called you.”

“It should have been me. I was the one who needed to apologize. You left for Tibet thinking you needed to change.”

“Cause I did. I was keeping secrets from you. Like you said, I was compartmentalizing our relationship. Always had been. You were right.” It was the only way Jenny really knew to keep other people safe. She’d learned a long, long time ago that nothing good came from telling the truth. Sometimes Abbie was right, the lie is kinder.

But sometimes, Abbie’s way meant Jenny lost what she really wanted.

Laura squeezed Jenny’s hip. “But I was just as guilty. I just. I didn’t call and didn’t call. And then it was three days, a week, a month. It had been too long.”

“I know. Me too.” Jenny sighed. “I was just stupid.”

Laura grazed her hand over Jenny’s hip, up to her elbow, to her bicep. The warmth and weight of her palm were exactly the same as they had always been.

Jenny took Laura’s hand and lifted it to her lips. She kissed the inside of her wrist, lightly. “I missed you then.”

Laura unwound her wrist from Jenny’s hand, sliding their palms together. “Me too, querida. Me too.”

This time, when Laura pressed her lips to Jenny’s shoulder, Jenny recognized the heat and need there. She twisted herself over, nearly falling – Laura held her waist tight so she wouldn’t fall off the edge of the couch – and managed to turn herself to face Laura. Their knees were a messy tangle, there wasn’t really enough room, but it was worth it.

Jenny took Laura’s face in her hands, arms folded close between their chests, and kissed her. It was a question, and Laura answered it with a kiss of her own.

It was the dead of night, either very late or very early, and who knew what they’d face in the morning. There were zombies trying to eat them and there was magic boiling in her blood. And Jenny still missed Laura. She had been a coward to stay away so long.

She wouldn’t be a coward now.

She smeared her lips over Laura’s, capturing them even as they tried to capture hers. Laura nipped over Jenny’s jaw, sliding her body lower on the couch to reach her neck, sucking hungry kisses over long muscles to the sensitive hollow between her collarbones.

Jenny closed her eyes and let her fingers tangle in Laura’s thick, soft curls. Fuck it, fuck everything else, and fuck the consequences. Laura pushed Jenny’s jacket off, then tugged the front of Jenny’s t-shirt up and over her breasts, bunching it above them, and kissed down between them while with her one free hand she unhooked Jenny’s bra. Undone, she pushed the unwanted fabric up and away, capturing a nipple with an open mouth and eager tongue as she slid her hand down her back to her ass.

Jenny arched against Laura’s lips, hissing when Laura scraped with a gentle bite. Her eyes drifted open, her heart awash in something unbearably fond. Laura glowed like a bioluminescent fish in the depths of the ocean. So did Jenny.

“Dammit,” Jenny grunted.

Laura reared back. “Did I hurt you?” she asked.

Jenny pulled back, off the couch, and knelt on the floor. She tugged down her bra, ignoring the clasp in the back, and then her shirt. “No, it’s just. My thing with the magic. Is kind of… on.”

“On?” Laura asked, her voice steady.

“It’s distracting. And creepy.”

Laura reared back as much as she could on the small couch. “I’m going to believe you when you say it’s not me that stopped you. You don’t regret what we’re doing?”

Jenny wilted a little. “No. I probably should, so should you, but I really don’t.”

“Okay. I don’t either.”

“I can tell.”

Laura froze. “You mean you can magically tell? How?”

“The way your blood is pumping. Pretty slow and steady, considering. If you were upset, it would be racing.”

“So you can see my blood?”

“And electrical signals,” Jenny said, “your guts. You’re hungry. Your stomach is churning acid.”

“Electrical signals where?”

“In your head.”

“My _brain_?”

Jenny rubbed her forehead. This was complicated enough without the two of them being literally fucking transparent. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be invasive. But I can’t help it.”

“No, what? This is incredibly cool. Tell me what you see.”

Laura was here to help her with this, after all, so Jenny leaned toward where Laura was now sitting on the couch, bracing herself with a hand on Laura’s knee. She willed her magical whateverness to be stronger, more intense, to get a better look.

“Whoa,” Laura marveled.

“What?” Jenny asked, sitting back on her haunches, letting go.

“No, do that again.”

“What? Touch your knee?”

“It was. Um. Warm, very warm, and tingly, like pins and needles but super sensitive, not numb.”

“Are you sure?”

Laura raised an eyebrow, which Jenny only saw from the inside as veins shifted above one eye.

“For science,” Jenny quipped then, reaching out to lay her hand on Laura’s knee.

Laura was still for a few seconds. “Tell me what you see,” she finally said in a thick whisper.

Jenny tried to describe it. “Your blood, tiny capillaries at the surface thumping, sparks, nerves pulsing a kind of rhythm. Fast. Like, hummingbird fast.”

“Uh huh. Yeah.” Laura exhaled a little unsteadily.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Laura whiffled a laugh. “No?”

“You don’t sound sure.”

Laura held Jenny’s hand in place with a firm grip. “No.”

“Okay,” Jenny said, not entirely sure this wasn’t dangerous. She had dropped Ichabod with a touch. But she had control now, some control anyway, and she could feel and see that the energy she was – what? calling up? injecting? sharing? – wasn’t enough to stop Laura’s heart. She could also see, now that she really looked, that blood was pumping down her leg and up her thigh, pooling… oh.

Jenny sat back again, slipping her hand out from under Laura’s.

“What’s wrong?” Laura asked.

The effect faded at her knee now, but her body glowed stronger at her nipples, her mouth, and between her legs, like some glow-in-the-dark sex chart. “Is this weird? I think this might be very weird.”

Laura nodded slowly. “Remember when I spilled that vial of Patagonian love potion?”

Jenny’s head fell back almost in a laugh. “You were irresistible. Damn.”

“It was weird too.”

“It was hot.”

“For me it was weird. Great, with you – not so much with literally everyone else – but with you? Great. And still weird.”

Jenny nodded. “I see.”

Laura sat forward, taking Jenny’s hand. “Look, we’re going to figure this out. This place used to be polymer central, plus there are libraries in Boston we can check, resources all up and down the coast. We’re going to de-magic-ify you. We are. Just like we deactivated that potion.”

Jenny’s heart pounded with what was coming. Thank goodness Laura couldn’t sense it. It was bad enough she could see the capillaries in Laura’s cheeks spreading just under the surface of her skin.

“So I’m thinking, in the meantime. If you’re willing.”

“Why not enjoy it?” Jenny finished.

In answer, Laura kissed Jenny, wrapping a hand around the back of her neck. “Yeah,” Laura whispered between kisses, stopping just long enough to pull her shirt over her head.

Jenny threaded her fingers into Laura’s hair and leaned her against the back of the couch. She trailed her fingertips down Laura’s neck, over her shoulders, light as a breeze over her breasts, her hard nipples, and down her sides, then up her back to unclasp her bra. She pulled it over her arms and dropped it on the floor.

Laura’s breasts were always inviting but now, glowing like this, they were miraculous: pulsing with blood, twinkling with tiny bursts of electricity. She took one nipple between her lips and brushed the tip of it with her tongue, long and slow. Jenny groaned. Now she made her tongue a point, opening her mouth over the areola, taking it all in, and traced around Laura’s nipple, pressing harder. Another groan.

Maybe it was because Jenny was so scared out of her mind she thought she’d fly apart. Maybe it was because they could both die tomorrow. But as good and as right as all this felt, Jenny did not give a damn.

She wanted Laura.

Jenny found Laura’s other breast with warm fingers. She cupped it, reminding herself of its delicious weight, and then pinched her nipple between thumb and forefinger. Laura’s breath came louder. Jenny twisted. Even louder. She glanced at it; just under the surface, her nipple looked like fireworks, exploding, receding, exploding again.

She felt okay. In control. Not in danger of killing her lover with a touch. Nothing like that first afternoon with Ichabod. So she went further.

Jenny sent a small jolt, almost nothing, no more than a puff of breath, through her fingers and into Laura’s breast. A test run. Probably wouldn’t do anything.

It did. Laura jerked into Jenny’s hand. “Fuck!”

“Sorry.”

“Do it again.”

Jenny sat back to watch, reaching both hands to cup Laura’s breasts. She brushed her thumbs over her nipples for another jolt, a little stronger this time.

“My God.”

Her breasts were glowing, but now her entire torso was alight and a triangle of energy was growing, warming she guessed, connecting her breasts and each breast to her cunt. Jenny huffed a surprised laugh. “Wow.”

“More. Jenny. For God’s sake, more.”

Jenny loved this tell, when Laura would get so hot and hungry that she suddenly was all about God. She grinned, watching Laura writhe with the pleasure that still echoed on her skin. “Tell me,” Jenny insisted. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

Laura licked her lips. “For science?”

“Sure, yeah, for science.”

She pushed her hair back off her forehead and thought for a moment, catching her breath. “It’s heat and sizzle, and like turning the volume dial all the way up. Wherever you touch me, my body gets hotter and, I don’t know, louder somehow. And just. Damn. So turned on. Holy shit.”

“So, more?”

Laura’s fingers were already working the fly on her jeans. “God yes.”

Jenny helped get her pants open and off, tugging them down with her panties while Laura somewhat clumsily toed off her shoes. Laura’s glow pulsed just under the skin, gathering toward her center, and Jenny didn’t care anymore about whether this was wise. One hand on Laura’s hip, Jenny slid her middle finger down her wet slit and inside.

She sent a gentle surge of energy through her finger. Laura grunted her pleasure, deep in her throat.

“Good?” Jenny asked, smirking in the darkness. She guessed it was; Laura’s blood was flying through her veins, her cunt pounding with it like a second heart.

Laura grabbed her jaw and pulled her down, capturing Jenny’s bottom lip between her lips and teeth.

Jenny added another finger, curling them together, then scissoring them wide. Another jolt, more this time, and Laura bucked her hips. Now she held her palm over her mound, her clit, and sent a general, softer pulse through her whole hand.

“Yeah,” Laura breathed. “Do that.”

“What about this?” Jenny asked, dipping her thumb into the wet slick before pressing it against her clit and sending a precise jolt through it.

Laura bucked again, sending Jenny’s fingers deeper. “Jesus, yes. Both of those. Can you do both?”

Jenny kissed her lips sweetly. “I can try,” she said.

She imagined a cloud of energy in her palm and her fingers, and a dart in her thumb. Exhaling with the mental effort, she sent them both at the same time. Laura’s hips lifted, rolling against Jenny’s hand expectantly. She did it again, and again Laura’s hips rose to meet her.

Jenny wondered if it had to be fingers, or if she could create the effect some other way. Like just with her mind.

Or with her mouth. Jenny pulled her fingers out and laid her hand on Laura’s hip.

“What? No, don’t stop.”

“But we know that works. I want to try something a little different.”

“We don’t know it works all the way. Come back,” Laura whimpered.

Jenny slid her hands to Laura’s thighs and gently pushed them wider apart, kneeling back to the floor.

Laura’s breath stopped. “Oh, okay, this is good too.”

She looked at Laura’s cunt, glowing and swollen and wet. She had known this body so well once, known what made it sing, what made it wriggle under her. But she had never _known_ it this way, seen the way the tunnel of her vagina gaped hungrily as Laura slid her ass to the edge of the couch cushion. She’d never known how powerful the connection was between Laura’s cunt and her breasts, the way currents shot up into them when Jenny’s fingers moved inside her. And now, as she bent her head to tease Laura’s clit with her tongue, how her entire body’s glow whitened, hotter and hotter.

Jenny licked it, getting her ready, getting her used to such intense sensation. When Laura curled her hips up to Jenny’s mouth, she sucked at it gently. Laura whimpered, wrapping her hand around the back of Jenny’s neck, a move that Jenny remembered. It meant yes.

Her fingers sticky-slick still, she slipped three inside Laura. Laura groaned as she was filled, stretched, and Jenny didn’t wait. She kissed a dart of electricity into Laura’s clit just as her hand exhaled another cloud of magical excitement.

“Jenny, Jesus, do it again, do it again.”

And Jenny did, over and over until with an open-mouthed, full-throated _ah_ Laura came.

Soon Laura wanted to return the favor, but they were both so tired, Jenny most of all. And that energy didn’t come from nowhere, or the air, or a plug in the wall. It was all Jenny. Now she was nearly empty. “I’m good,” she murmured, already halfway dreaming.

When the sudden crash woke them, it was gray dawn. Jenny kicked herself for not bothering to get dressed again before they both fell asleep.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Jenny prowled through the inky passageways with her Desert Eagle drawn. She wore only a t-shirt, underwear, and boots with no socks. Fuck this. Fuck this. She was getting pretty goddamn tired of these undead assholes barging in. She had enough on her plate, what with stumbling back between Laura’s thighs and getting magic – without dealing with zombies every six hours.

“Jenny.” Laura tugged on the hem of her t-shirt. Somehow she’d managed to get fully dressed, minus her shoes, which worried Jenny in case they had to run for it. Or kick things. “I don’t smell anything. If they’re zombies, we’d almost certainly smell them by now.”

Sniff. Sniff. She was right. No tang of rotting meat and old flowers. Just a musty smell that reminded Jenny of the doctor’s office.

“It could just be kids,” Laura whispered.

“It could be.” It was certainly the kind of thing Jenny would have done as a kid. C’mon, an old pharmaceutical factory? Of course kids are going to try to score drugs. But until she had some whimpering little brat in her sights, she was assuming zombies. “Stay close.” They crept down the stairs, Laura pressed against Jenny’s back in a way that was both reassuring and distracting.

More than anything, more than to be magic-free, now Jenny wished Laura wasn’t here. Not after last night and the buzzy electricity that passed between them. She wanted Laura to be somewhere safe, somewhere she could nerd out and be happy. Somewhere Jenny could visit when it was safe again. She didn’t want Laura to be part of this.

She didn’t want Laura to get hurt.

Another crash. Jenny tensed, poised on the balls of her feet. Whatever it was, it was close, just beyond this door, back out on the main manufacturing floor.  
“I’m gonna kick this door open. And I want you to flatten yourself up against that wall and make yourself as small as you can until I tell you it’s clear. Got it?”

“Just – don’t die. Please? Not after this.” Laura pressed a quick peck to her cheek – her lips flared with sparkles – and then did as Jenny asked.

Right. That made it a little harder to concentrate, but Jenny was a professional. She could do this. One, two –

The door burst in. Light dazzled her eyes, blinding after hours in the gloom. Jenny held her bullet-less gun by the barrel, ready to pistol whip the everloving fuck out of whatever was waiting there.

“Found her. Crane, give me your coat.”

“Whatever for?” The light swung out of her eyes. There was goddamn Ichabod Crane, looming over her sister’s shoulder. As he blinked in the dim light, his eyes fell to her bare legs. His cheeks bloomed with color even as he shimmied out of his coat. “How did you misplace your trousers, Miss Jenny?”

“I know where they are, they just aren’t on me.” Jenny accepted the coat for his benefit. It smelled surprisingly good, leather and lye soap, the kind her grandma used. The hem brushed her ankles. She did up the last couple buttons and dropped her gun into a giant pocket. “Glad you guys aren’t zombies.”

“So are we. This Laura?” Abbie nodded at the person who was obviously Laura.

“Yeah. Er, Dr. Nuñez,” she said for Crane’s old-timey benefit. He shot her a grateful smile. “Laura, this is my sister Abbie and her partner Ichabod Crane.” Even though they’d been an item for over a year now, “partner” seemed like the best word for the two of them. It was more than boyfriend and girlfriend, it went deep, past the bone, all the way to the soul.

Jenny wasn’t sure if this thing with Laura went all the way to the soul, but it definitely went to the bone.

Crane’s eyes darted between the sisters before he beamed brightly at Laura. “A pleasure to meet you, Doctor. I understand you’ve been assisting Miss Jenny with her sudden magicalism. Perhaps I might assist you in your endeavor?” He offered a crooked, scrawny arm.

Laura took in the spectacle that was Ichabod Crane. He’d ditched the Colonial Williamsburg garb, except for the boots and coat, some time ago. But with that hair and that regal bearing, he would always stand out. “You’re interesting,” Laura said.

Jenny laughed. “You want to go round up the chemicals you need? Crane will have your back.”

Laura hesitated a moment more, but the mystery of Ichabod was too irresistible. She took his arm and the two set off, already chattering about the crystal while using words way too big to just be slung around like that.

“How’d you find us?” Jenny asked when they were out of earshot.

“Locator spell. You okay?”

Jenny nodded. “Close enough.”

Abbie pursed her lips. “Last I saw you, you were terrified to touch anybody. You sure it’s a great idea for you to be sleeping with somebody?”

Nope. Nope nope nope. “Yes.”

Abbie grinned. “Good for you. Now catch me up while we do a perimeter.”

Abbie spotted Jenny a couple of new clips and they were off, Jenny at point with Abbie at her six. They stalked the darkened hallways, listening, sniffing, guns at the ready. And they whispered to each other the details of the mishaps since they’d last seen each other.

The raid on the zombie nest had been a bust. Nothing but old shredded papers and some brain matter. Abbie still wasn’t sure whose it was. But then the fuckers had been waiting for them back at the archives.

“It was touch and go. Crane wound up bloody, but it must have been from a nail or broken glass or something, because no zombification. Kept him in quarantine the last twenty-four, but I think we’re past the danger zone now.”

Jenny looked back at her sister – quick and casual-like. “That must’ve sucked.”

“Yup.”

A rat scurried; Jenny stilled her itchy trigger finger at the last second to avoid blowing its furry little head off.

“Wait, back up a sec. The zombies never came looking for you?” Jenny asked.

“We only ran into them in their nest. Did get minor-league distracted by a ghoul for a minute, but pretty sure that was unrelated.”

Oh. So. She’d kind of figured, but there it was. The only commonality in all the zombie attacks was Jenny. If she had anything in her stomach, she might have thrown up.

“Anyway,” Abbie continued, “we started getting worried about you after those messages but thought they might be able to intercept the call. So a little locator spell and poof, here we are. But how are you?”

Jenny gave her the short version. Zombies. Panicked driving. J.B. Zombies. Panicked driving. “It was more exciting if you were there,” she summed up.

“Sorry about your friend.”

“He was a dick.” _A dick who died because I asked him for help_. “ But thanks.”

“But the whole magic thing is still a thing?”

Jenny glanced back. “Dunno what you’re thinking about but there are a lot of sparkles on the right front part of your brain.”

“That never gets less weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“We’ll find a way to get rid of it. Wouldn’t be surprised if Crane and Laura cured cancer while they’re at it.”

“We can’t fix me.” The words came out sharp and spiky. “I’m one of the few things that can kill zombies. We need me a freak.”

The soft and steady scuff of Abbie’s feet faltered behind her. “You’re not a freak, Jenny. You’re just mojoed is all.”

“Just like before when I was possessed. It’s always something.” Jenny shook her head. After so many incidents that changed who she was at the very fabric of her being, Jenny had to start thinking maybe she was the problem after all. “Doesn’t matter. Ancient history. Bottom line is, we need me like this now. What I want doesn’t enter into it.”

“Look, killing zombies is hard but you’re not the only option we have. There's that zombie powder you were telling me about, we’ve got choices.”

“I’m the best choice. You’re practical enough to know that.”

“You said taking out zombies nearly killed you. You dying is never a ‘best choice.’ What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Jenny didn’t have the energy to fight this fight right now. “Coast’s clear. I’m gonna go get my pants.”

Abbie let her go. Jenny knew storming off alone probably wasn’t her smartest move ever, but they did both have guns. And there was nothing here, just mothballed machinery and mean rodents.

Why was it that when Abbie wanted to make a big heroic gesture it was full-steam ahead, but when Jenny wanted to do the same it was this "we have options" bullshit? Their options all sucked. But Jenny’s gave the greatest odds that everyone would stay safe.

They wanted her.

Maybe this was what Jenny was supposed to be: a weapon. She was good at fighting. Always had been. Guns, knives, wits, didn’t matter, Jenny could best anyone. 

Except herself. That was always the rub.

So maybe now God or whoever was pulling the strings here had made her into a weapon. All of her. And it was her job to protect this tiny handful of people she loved until she had nothing more to give.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Lonely. But then, Jenny was used to that too.

Somewhere under the armor that clung to her insides, a truth murmured: This magic isn’t just for fighting. This is for joy. This is for love. Her power had made Laura happy; had made her happy, if only for a few minutes. She wasn’t a weapon, not entirely.

But maybe she needed to be.

When Jenny stomped back down to the manufacturing floor with her pants on and Laura’s shoes in hand, Abbie was leaning against a table with a dopey smile while Laura and Ichabod bent over something Jenny couldn’t see. Laura was tiny and curved next to Crane’s tall, straight angles. But her excitement made her seem ten feet tall.

“So you see, if you mix the ferrous oxide with a simple tincture of rosemary—“

“No tincture of rosemary here,” Laura interrupted. “But I bet we can get the same general effect with another antifungal agent, like bifonazole, which should be here somewhere…”

Jenny took a lean beside her sister. “God they’re dorks.”

“Such dorks,” Abbie confirmed, then drifted toward the tête-à-shoulder. Soon, she was swept into the busy burble of science babble.

So the zombies wanted her. Or what was inside of her, what the rocks had done. Fine. But they weren’t going to get her dorks too.

Laura and Crane were speaking in Spanish – Crane’s was bumbling and Laura couldn’t stop laughing at his accent, all continental lisp with a trace of something that sounded French. Abbie was shaking her head indulgently as she rifled through the assorted expired chemicals on the workbench in front of them.

Jenny’s heart gave a weird sideways thump. She felt like she should say something – goodbye, Abbie you can have all my weapons, Crane you can have all my books, Laura I –

But she didn’t. She quietly slipped off of the dusty manufacturing floor. And one by one, she circled and bolted every door shut.

Jenny sat down in a broken bucket seat in the lobby to wait. They’d be coming.

They pounded on the doors for about an hour. She even heard a gunshot, which – really, Abbie? -- but she ignored it. Tried to feel numb and distant.

Abbie started with FBI negotiation at its finest, which was cute. Like Jenny hadn’t read the manual as many times as she had. You could check the steps right off the list: Trying to get Jenny to talk to her. Saying she knew how Jenny felt. Throwing out alternative solutions, all of them shit.

Crane murmured suggestions until Abbie threatened to cram his coat down his throat.

When she was done being Special Agent Mills, she became Big Sister. Laid on the guilt trips and the teasing and the “am I going to have to bury you, too?” 

That one stung.

She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want Abbie to have to stick another cheap coffin in the ground. But she couldn’t live knowing the danger she brought wherever she went. And she refused to live cut off from these people. No. Better to go down defending them. No matter how much this hurt them all.

Laura stepped up later. “You really gonna do this to me again? Just freeze me out? You know I can fix this. You know I’m good. Let me pay you back for all those times you saved me.” Her voice dropped low. “Let me pay you back for last night.”

Jenny watched the erratic beat of her own heart pulse blood through her veins.

She could smell the zombies coming. It was like an itch inside her brain, coupled with a phantom stench of spoiled meat. She couldn’t think about them back in that room, couldn’t think about the pleading, desperate note in Abbie’s voice, the hitch in Laura’s throat. She refused to listen to their pleas and threats and reasonings. She had to be calm and empty. Ready.

They were here. Seven of them, she thought. No, wait, more. Ten. At least.

This would be the end of it. It had to be.

“Love you,” she whispered to no one and everyone. She stood.

They swarmed in a minute later, a reeking shamble of grossness in their tidy suits. And they came right for her.

The pounding on the door behind her picked up speed. Jenny closed her eyes. Quick. Quick. Before the door gave out.

She counted eleven sludgy pools of blackness here with her. There. Just grab it, just take it, and then –

But there was more. Off, off on the edge of her magic vision, there were more. More tar-pit puddles. More zombies spreading far across the horizon, back toward Sleepy Hollow, up toward Boston, beyond.

She really could end this. Take them all out in one fell swoop.

Jenny smiled and reached for the darkness.

It swarmed over her at once, hot and stultifying. But she kept going. She was a zombie vacuum cleaner, hoovering out all that sticky evil. One by one, the pools began to run dry. And so did Jenny. It hurt. But not as much as it felt fucking satisfying.

Three things happened in rapid succession: The door buckled, gunshots rang out, and someone punched her in the face.

It was soft, as far as punches go. But in her weakened state it was enough to yank her out of her stupor – no there were still more of them! – and send her tumbling to the floor.

Her vision was dim, and maybe Jenny was going crazy, but she could swear that was Laura who was scampering away from Jenny, shaking her hand and hurling handfuls of powder at the remaining zombies.

“Jenny, you’re a goddamn idiot,” Abbie called between blasts of high-caliber bullets.

Crane slid to his knees beside Jenny. “While rudely expressed, I must agree. That was most foolish, Miss Jenny.”

“Are you really lecturing me in the middle of all this?” Jenny wheezed. It hurt more now. Holy hell, it hurt, a generalized blaze of pain in every nerve.

“No, I –“ Crane paused, nonchalantly picking up a severed hand that was crawling toward them and hurling it across the room – “I’m your nursemaid.”

Jenny coughed. Blood spattered out, neon and crawling with life in Jenny’s eyes. “Oh. That’s probably good.” He jammed a syringe into her chest; the crunching puncture felt like a kiss compared to the frostbite burn of the blackness.

The last thing she saw before the darkness inside her swarmed outside of her was her sister and her lover, fighting back-to-back.

* * *

 

She woke up.

She was so surprised by this fact – that she was awake which implied consciousness which implied how the fuck am I alive – that it took her several minutes to realize she was in her own bed.

Couldn’t be. She couldn’t possibly be alive. Not after the amount of sludge she’d taken on. Was this hell?

She fumbled for the .22 in her bedside table and stumbled to the door.

They were sitting around her table, the three of them. “Get Well Soon!” balloons were tied to every chair. And in the middle of the table was a cake.

“Wha?” Jenny managed.

Dark circles carved under all of their eyes. But as soon as they saw her, they were all on their feet. No one touched her, hugged her. They hovered. Waited.

“Oh God, am I dead?” Jenny asked.

“Only for like three minutes,” Laura said. “Not enough for brain damage. Though you might have suffered that when you planned your stupid last stand.”

Abbie hugged her then, rough and hard, all balled fists and pointy chins in shoulders.

“How pissed are you?” Jenny bent her head to lean against Abbie’s neck. Not for the first time, she wished her big sister actually were the big sister.

“Crane once drank a bottle of poison in a fit of heroic melodrama. I offered to stay behind in Purgatory. That’s your one diva moment. Hope it was worth it.” Abbie squeezed tighter. “You are worth fighting for. Let us fight for you next time.”

Abbie pulled back. Tears sparkled; Jenny watched as more formed, turning from icy blue to transparent as they moved from tear duct to cheek. She swallowed the lump in her throat.

Crane gave his own hug, massive and enveloping. “Brave, yet foolish. But then, you know that.”

“It’s what we do best,” Jenny said.

Laura didn’t hug her. She was fussing with plates and forks. For the cake, presumably. “Had to do something while you were out,” she said, perpetually in motion, forever avoiding eye contact. “It’s been two days, by the way.”

“That all?” Seemed pretty good for nearly wiping out a zombie hoard. “Are they gone?”

“We’ve neither seen nor heard tell of them,” Crane said. “And we’ve been looking, every moment we haven’t been at your side.”

“I didn’t get them all. I know I didn’t. I felt them.” She’d been close. All of this would have been worth it if only she’d just finished what she started.

“Then you’ll feel them again and we’ll go take care of it. In a sane, sensible way,” Abbie said.

“I…”

“You don’t have to apologize. You were dumb and selfish. But your heart was in the right place,” Abbie said.

“Right. Learn from it,” Laura said. And that’s when Jenny noticed what was written on the cake. There, in black and spidery icing, she had written “YOU MAKE BAD CHOICES.” Below it was a heart.

Jenny started to laugh, but then she spotted what was sitting next to the cake. It was the crystal. The stupid crystal that had broken and started all this.

But it wasn’t broken anymore. It was fixed. Perfect. Not even a crack.

“Ah. Yeah. First I fixed the rock. Then I baked the cake.” Laura looked at her expectantly. Waiting.

Did that mean … then did that mean--?

She caught sight of Laura’s face. It was shining, blazing with light. And for just a split-second, Jenny was disappointed. That she was still like this. That the rock was whole but she wasn’t.

But the more she looked at that glowing face, the more peace she felt.

Jenny moved toward Laura. Too fast – she reeled a moment, dizzy. But Laura’s arms were around her then and somehow she was blazing with light. It wasn’t like before, it wasn’t like watching her stomach gurgle or her lungs compress. It was something past all that, or maybe above all that.  
Jenny was watching her soul shine.

She kissed Laura, just to take a little bit of that beauty for herself.

“Well. We’ve got, you know, apocalypses to avert and all. Don’t we, Crane?”

“No, things have been extraordinarily calm, zombies aside –“

“I’ll be by later with some dinner,” Abbie said as she dragged him out the door. “Nothing overly strenuous.”

Jenny cradled Laura’s shining face in her hands. They caught the silver from Laura’s skin. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to do it again.”

“It can’t be like this. If there’s going to be a this. You have to trust me. We have to be partners.”

Jenny swallowed. Trust hadn’t gotten her much good in life. Usually it got her locked up, shot at, or worse.

But for Laura, for the woman whose soul she could see plain as day, she would try.

“This world goes deep. It’s not safe,” Jenny warned.

“I know. I’ve already been working with Ichabod and Abbie on how we can add safety measures. I think some unconventional alchemy could really improve your patrol methods and results. I’ve done some tinkering and –“

Jenny kissed her. And it was magic.

_The end._

 


End file.
